Emergency eyewashes and showers provide a rapid washing to a person contaminated with a dangerous chemical whether the exposure is in a research laboratory, a farm, or in the exhaust of a nitromethane burning AA fuel funny car. However, the systems provide no benefit, and further are a detriment for creating false hope if the equipment does not work.
Various existing emergency eyewash basins and showers utilize complex flow systems that require professional installation and adjustment. Therefore, if an emergency wash site does not work, the employer is required to “lock out” and “tag out” that site until it is repaired. Often, it takes days to schedule the professional to service the site, and further time delays are encountered to simply order the parts, which by their complexity are too expensive to be maintained in inventory at the worksite.
Yet other problems arise when it is difficult to check and adjust the operation of the emergency wash site. If it is not easy to determine that the equipment is working properly, then the employers may not apply appropriate resources to routinely check the equipment. Under such circumstances, the wash site may not provide sufficient flow, or may provide flow that is too hot, and any user of the wash site may suffer as a result.
Yet other eyewash basins are generally round in shape, or otherwise lacking in any geometric feature that can be felt by the hands of a user during an emergency. In such emergency conditions, the user may be temporarily blinded, and thus have difficulty aligning him/herself with the eyewash nozzles. Since time is important in washing contaminants from the eye, the additional seconds required for the person to align his/her eyes with the nozzle spray pattern could result in increased injury. Many such basins are generally featureless in terms of letting the user tacitly (by hand) locate themselves with their eyes shut.
Still further, many transportable emergency wash systems suffer from inadequate protection from damage to the wash site as it is being transported. The act of transport can include multiple types of single occurrence shocks to the equipment, such as during loading and unloading. Further, wash sites can be located near sources of vibration, such as a Hemi® running open headers. This can be a problem if parts of the wash system include electronic apparatus.
Further, it is becoming increasingly important for water to be conserved, and this is even more important in those situations in which the water at the wash site comes from a limited reservoir, or is otherwise limited by a failure in a thermostatically-controlled valve. During such valve failures, the amount of flow available is often less than about two gallons per minute. Some existing wash sites are not capable of providing an adequate wash to a contaminated user with such low flows.
Various embodiments of the present invention address some or all of these aspects, and still other aspects, in novel and unobvious ways.